A French accountant who helped reveal tax breaks for multinational companies in Luxembourg in a scandal known as "LuxLeaks" won the right to be recognised as a whistleblower on Tuesday at Europe's top rights court.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered Luxembourg to pay Raphael Halet 15,000 euros ($16,000) in damages and 40,000 euros in legal costs after ruling that Halet's right to freedom of expression had been violated.
In an appeal against a first ruling on the case, the court decided that "the public interest in the disclosure of that information outweighed all of the detrimental effects arising from it."
The LuxLeaks scandal erupted in 2014 and sparked a major global push against generous deals handed to multinational companies, which grew even stronger with new revelations such as the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers leaks.
Halet, a former employee of auditing company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), was fined 1,000 euros in Luxembourg over his role in sharing in 2012 internal tax documents with a journalist working for the French TV programme "Cash Investigation".
"It's the end of an 11-year legal fight, and not only legal, also against tax evasion," Halet, who is in his mid-40s, told reporters having come with his family to hear the ruling.
"It's maybe a step forward for others afterwards. That's the reason I carried on with this process for 11 years," he added.
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